


In the Wee Small Hours of the Morning

by Delphi



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Drama, F/M, Late at Night, Missing Scene
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-03-01
Updated: 2012-03-01
Packaged: 2017-10-31 23:20:22
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,469
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/349445
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Delphi/pseuds/Delphi
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Six vignettes set when the whole wide world is fast asleep.</p>
            </blockquote>





	In the Wee Small Hours of the Morning

**Author's Note:**

  * For [kelly_chambliss](https://archiveofourown.org/users/kelly_chambliss/gifts).



> Written as part of the Scarleteenfans auction on DW.

Severus Snape is very nearly handsome in the dark.

This is, perhaps, not the most charitable of observations—bordering on a backhanded compliment—but at midnight, with the school's newest hire standing between her and a late-night snack in the kitchens, Minerva McGonagall is not overly inclined to charity.

Now why in the world did nature always grant cheekbones like that to unappreciative young men? She lingers where she is, unnoticed in the dark corridor, and regards Mr. Snape in appraisal. His arms are crossed, his shoulders hunched. He leans heavily against the door that leads out to the central courtyard, gazing through the narrow window into the night, his expression lost in the shadows.

It's late November, and the sky over the castle is perpetually overcast. And yet, though the light that creeps in through the window is grey and indistinct, it cuts the young man's profile into slivers of black and white. His hair and eyes and the line of those cheekbones are as dark as his shapeless robes, in stark contrast to the pallor of his sharp-featured face and his long hands. It's rather striking.

He's been accused of being a subversive. A collaborator, if not a Death Eater. Or so she's heard. Dumbledore won't confirm it, but Alastor Moody has had more than enough to say on the subject. Mr. Snape went away a solemn boy with a vicious streak running through him like a pin through an apple, and he came back a silent young man, cringing under Albus's fatherly hand.

Is he guilty? Perhaps, she thinks. She can imagine unlikelier criminals. But he certainly doesn't seem to smile much for someone who's allegedly got away with murder.

Her posture straightens. Criminal or no, one of Albus Dumbledore's pet projects is not going to stand between her and a midnight dose of toast and jam. She squares her shoulders and proceeds down the corridor, and at the tap of her slipper-clad feet, Mr. Snape all but leaps like a cat with a scorched tail.

His wand is out in a flash, and the whirl of his robes nearly hides what Minerva (no guilty, knee-high student) does not miss: that his hand darts to his eyes, wiping quickly and surreptitiously.

She adopts an expression of polite obliviousness. It's winter allergies, certainly. Filch has been slack with his dusting. And yet, the _Mister—_ upon her lips is killed out of mercy as she grants him a curt nod:

"Professor Snape."

* * *

_Click. Click. Click._

Minerva dips her quill once again into the red ink pot as the footsteps pass outside her door. It is, in a way, a comfort to know she isn't the only one up entirely too late on a Friday evening. According to rumour, there exist teaching jobs that begin and end with the sounding of school bells, but personally, she would put better stock in finding an albino lethifold in her bathtub tomorrow morning.

Headship is not for the un-industrious. Filius single-handedly runs just about every extracurricular activity the school offers, and Aurora is near-constantly rewriting her course material for want of astrophysical texts aimed at the eleven-year-old set. Minerva herself is a great believer in essays, with the hopes of forcing at least a little English education upon the students, and their newest addition seems to have bonded with Argus Filch over a shared determination not to let a single student slip off the grounds, where they would presumably get into the sort of trouble that only people like Severus Snape and Argus Filch knew about.

She's crossed paths with him now and then as he roams the school, patrolling the exits on the main floor and peering into the library and the supply cupboards, and she's come to know the sound of his tread as he restlessly paces the corridors. He walks more softly than Argus Filch, with a smooth gait that sweeps his robes behind him. It's become something like background noise, akin to the crackling of the fire and the scratch of her quill as she circles a series of spelling errors. His patrols usually span the hour after lights-out, but now and again they continue on. On those nights, there is no sound of doors quietly opening and shutting, no footsteps on stairs. Instead, he walks up and down the main corridor, past her office ten times in one hour, his steps slow and thoughtful, his pauses frequent.

This time, she sets down her quill and waits. After three minutes, she stands and walks quietly to the door. She has just as little patience for students out of bed after curfew as he does, but the thought of giving him a taste of his own medicine is irresistible. So it is that just as he's about to round the fifth iteration of his pacing, she's waiting, hand on the latch, and she pulls the door open just as he passes.

"You can stop wearing a trench in the floor and come inside, if you'd like," she says, suppressing a smirk at his startled glower. "I've put the kettle on."

And to her surprise, he does.

* * *

There are very few men in her life whom Minerva can make blush. Hiram quite lacks the ability, despite his old-fashioned disapproval of everything unapologetically feminine; Filius is an earnest collector of classic erotica and Minoan fertility art; and Alastor Moody is the sort of Auror who believes that graphic descriptions of magical sexual mishaps resulting in Ministry intervention make for acceptable conversation over tea. Albus Dumbledore is, of course, an unknown quantity, but she has the sneaking suspicion that he can give better than he gets, and so she lets that sleeping dragon lie.

Severus Snape is fair game, however. He keeps roses in his cheeks, and they bloom every time even the most figurative girdle enters the conversation. After a year of irregular invitations, he comes by for tea almost every Friday night now, at an hour far too late for civilised entertaining, and to her apartments almost as often as to her office. On his good nights, he dredges up the manners to bring a bottle of wine with him, or a plate from the kitchens, or a book he's read that she's expressed interest in. On later ones, when they should both be abed, he sits uncomfortably at the very edge of the sofa like a barely domesticated vulture, and Minerva sips her tea, watching him from her armchair, and does her best to scandalise him.

She really shouldn't indulge herself so, and in daylight hours, perhaps she'd be properly ashamed of herself. But she knows all too well what it is to be young and heartbroken in this place, and she has no intention of positioning herself as some manner of sympathetic, auntly ear.

Tonight, she finishes the last of her tea and glances at the clock, which is at entirely too small a number. "I should be getting to bed. You can see yourself out, unless you plan to join me."

There's a small hiccough as Snape chokes on his tea, and she chuckles in satisfaction before catching the way his hands twitch in his lap. She stands up, and so does he, but neither move.

She raises an eyebrow in inquiry, and he raises his right back. Oh my.

His footsteps follow her, close behind, and in the cool shadows of her bedroom, he is almost handsome and perhaps she is not far too old to be taking a youth of twenty-two to her bed. She kisses him, his cheek warm beneath her hand, and if he is still blushing, it is far too dark to tell.

* * *

They're discreet. Oh, their colleagues might ask when the wedding's set for every time they bicker about Quidditch, but their affair is no open secret, and some part of her relishes the deception. There are so few secrets kept for long at Hogwarts, and those there are too often prove dark. She's confided in Pomona, and she supposes Dumbledore must know, in the way he knows everything, but otherwise, their business is their own. There are no Sunday trips to Hogsmeade, no walks around the lake—only the occasional indulgence in the very late hours when he comes walking past her door and she chooses to open it.

It never stops being novel. She has no expectations, save for good manners and mutual pleasure, and if Severus has any of his own, he does not voice them.

She's learned that he's unexpectedly warm: his skin, his mouth, his quiet moans. She knows he likes to kiss, and that he's rather good at it. He is focused, exacting, and in the first year they keep company, he is good for two matches in one night, so to speak, before time or practice blunts the urgency and he grows more temperate. He's rather charmingly smug every time he makes her come, confident in the talent of his fingers and his tongue. These are the happy surprises.

Less so: all the teasing and conversation ends at the bedroom door. He's invariably quiet as his clothes come off. Sometimes she suspects he's imagining someone else, but there isn't much sting to it, because sometimes so is she. He doesn't like to have his hair touched. He bristles when he’s told to hurry. Sometimes he tries to stay.

The nights add up strangely, one week here and another there, and she doesn't realise it's been nearly a decade until it stops, briefly, the year that Harry Potter starts Hogwarts. The footsteps do not find their way to the door of her apartments, and when they pass by her office, they are hurried and sharp. Her bed is empty for six months, perhaps eight, and if there is more equanimity in the shrug of her shoulders than in her heart, she nonetheless doesn't hold a grudge.

She asks no questions when he comes back just before the start of the summer holiday. He knocks this time, and she pours him a drink while he paces her sitting room, and when he insists on opening his mouth and then shutting it again and again as if trying to find some explanation for himself, she forestalls him with a kiss and takes him to bed, where he pushes himself insistently into her embrace as though there's nothing else to be had.

* * *

All of this is not so easy to forget. She thinks of him, in the last year of their acquaintance, only as the Headmaster. It is not something she allows herself to dwell on. The children are counting upon some adult in their lives to be rational and safe and sane, and there will be no giving in to soppiness or psychology. He is not Snape, and he is certainly not Severus, but he is inarguably present and must be named.

They communicate largely by way of memoranda. When they speak aloud to each other, their words are hollow, brittle, like delicate bones snapping between them. She does not dare look him in the eye, and yet she conjures his image in her private hours and practices some imaginary phrenology upon him, trying to read the truth of the matter in this curve of his brow, or that cut of his cheekbone. Her late hours are something very different now, and when she is out of her rooms in the middle of the night, it is with a particular determination not to cross his path.

And yet.

It happens only once. It's gone three o'clock in the morning, and she is sleepless, her wand in hand and a note for Filius transfigured into a pebble and tucked within her shoe. She hears the footsteps too late, and the slow collision is inevitable.

He catches her arm. She lets him. He says her name: "Minerva."

The sound of it breaks, and then it is her hand on his arm, pulling. The alcove is pitch black, and the only sound that follows is their frantic breathing and the dull thump when she shoves him against the wall. Her hand finds his neck when he pulls up her robes, and his fingers bruise her thighs. There's the dry click of his throat. The wet sound of his mouth and her sex.

Neither cries out as he drives into her hard, desperately, her leg around his waist and her wand pressed against his ribs. Her eyes squeeze shut tightly, and her vision flares in blue and red as she comes. Her body throbs, flush with arousal and anger, and so startled is she by the power of it that it takes several moments when it's all over for her to realise that he's trembling.

He's leaning against her, his face buried into the crook of her neck, and he is shaking so hard that his teeth are chattering.

She puts her hand on his shoulder. Her lips find his cheek, pressing softly. Then she pushes him gently away from her, and she straightens her clothing and hair before stepping back into the corridor and continuing on her errand with her eyes dry and open and her mind fixed upon the notion of inevitability.

* * *

The head's tower is a cosy place to be in the late or early hours. It rises above the rest of the castle like a crow's nest above a gently drifting ship, always muffled and buffeted by the winds. There are fireplaces, and a little kitchen, and no end of comfortable chairs in which to ensconce oneself with a budget report or a sheaf of correspondence.

Tonight, the sky outside is clear and the stars are bright as she nibbles on a bit of toast and jam whilst consulting a letter from the Minister for Magic. The portraits are dozing above her, and they barely stir as the clock strikes midnight and the kettle whistles in quick succession.

"Already?" she asks herself. Wondering, as she often has since taking this job, where the time has gone.

She rises stiffly from her desk and stretches briefly before crossing to the cupboard to make herself a cup of tea. Outside, the moon is a thin white crescent against the black sky, so sharp you could almost cut yourself on it. She smiles to see it, and then she hesitates, as she always does, before taking a second cup out of the cupboard.

The first cup, she fills. The other, empty, is placed on the corner of her desk. It's a silly, fruitless gesture, like pouring wine on a grave. And yet, when it's been a very tiring day and the hour is long, she supposes to herself that stranger meetings have occurred in the wee small hours, and that there is never any harm in being prepared for guests.  



End file.
